Pearl Memorial Lecture

The Raymond Pearl Memorial Lecture was established in 1983 by the Human Biology Association to honor one of the great human biologists of the 20th century. He received his PhD degree from the University of Michigan in 1902 with a dissertation on the behavior of Planaria under the mentorship of Herbert Spencer Jennings, and went on to post-graduate studies at the University of Leipzig and University College London where he studied under Karl Pearson. He was Chair of the Department of Biology at the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station from 1907-1918 and then joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University as Professor of Biometry and Vital Statistics at the School of Hygiene and Public Health, and was subsequently Professor of Biology there until his death in 1940. Pearl’s contributions to science were voluminous and included the areas of biostatistics and statistical methods, human population biology, population growth, aging, nutrition, genetics, animal behavior and physiology, and epidemiology, seeing all of these studies as part of a larger holistic human biology. He published more than 700 papers, wrote 15 books and founded and edited the Quarterly Review of Biology (1926) and Human Biology (1929). Raymond Pearl is commemorated each year at the Annual Meeting of the Human Biology Association with a memorial lecture delivered by an individual who has made outstanding contributions to science and with the presentation of a plaque. Over the past 30 years, the HBA is proud to have honored leading thinkers in every domain of our field: